


From the Flint Hills to that Possessed Chicken Farm (This Land Was Made for You and Me)

by aces



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Road Trip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-01-05
Updated: 2008-01-05
Packaged: 2017-10-15 08:02:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/158766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aces/pseuds/aces
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wind farms, cattle farms, demonic chickens.  Typical road trip with your brother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From the Flint Hills to that Possessed Chicken Farm (This Land Was Made for You and Me)

**Author's Note:**

> Not really spoilery; takes place sometime in the middle of the first season. Originally this was supposed to be all about the chickens; it kinda evolved into something else.

“Demonic _chickens_?” Dean repeated in disbelief for the tenth time at least since Sam had brought the potential case up.

“Yeah,” Sam said, again, for the tenth time at least. “Demonic chickens. The story was so damned _weird_ that the AP picked it up; I just found it online by accident.”

They were in the Kansas Flint Hills, not far from Cottonwood Falls on U.S. 50, heading west. Sunrise, and Sam had always liked sunrise and sunset in the Flint Hills. Extra crisp cold winter air, and the hills stamped with reds and browns and golds, the valleys in darkness while the tops of the hills were lit to an aching brightness. You could see the millennia of geology in these hills, he’d always thought, the gradual subsidence of glaciers and maybe just a gentle shift of tectonic plates.

Yeah, he’d always liked this area, even if Dean did take the opportunity at every steep slope to yell “Yee-haw!” while letting the Impala fly downhill.

It’d been a long night, ending in a long fire, and Sam was ready to catch a couple hours sleep. But he wasn’t finished telling Dean about the story he’d found. “You’re never gonna guess where these demonic chickens are.”

“Oh god,” Dean groaned, not taking his eyes off the road. “Just tell me.”

“Fowler, Colorado.” Sam bit his lip.

There was a moment of silence. “No,” Dean said. “Absolutely not. You’re shitting me, right?”

“Nope,” Sam sounded complacent. “Fowler, Colorado, where demented chickens have taken to plucking people’s eyes out and beating the shit out of them. And 50 heads right through the town.”

“Okay, then,” Dean said. “We’re gonna fucking hunt possessed chickens. Great. I just—I should be used to this sort of thing by now, shouldn’t I?”

Sam shrugged and put on a pair of sunglasses so he could sleep in peace.

*

“Jesus,” Dean said, staring out the passenger window, “that’s just fucking _creepy_.”

“Hey, man,” Sam said, “we’re in the Plains. Wind’s a great source of renewable energy, especially around here.” He looked out the window too, at the dozens of tall, clean white turbines marching in rows across the field diagonal to the highway.

“Dude,” said Dean, “they look like they’re signaling for the mothership to land.”

Dean had a point, Sam had to admit. There were a _lot_ of wind turbines over there. It was a windy day—Sam was actually kinda glad they were in the Impala, rather than some more modern, lightweight car; as it was, she was already pretty pissy about the strong northern breeze blasting against her side—and the blades on all those turbines were turning _fast_.

“How close are we to Colorado?” Dean dived over the back of the seat, hunting for the atlas he’d thrown behind him willy-nilly yesterday.

“A couple hours at least; could you chill please?” Dean made a really shitty passenger. He fidgeted and griped about the way Sam handled the Impala; it was no wonder Dad had gotten the truck as soon as he could after Dean got his license. Sam had only insisted on driving because after he’d woken up from his catnap and watched Dean veer all over the road for ten minutes, he’d told Dean either to pull over and let him drive or find a damned motel. “We’re not even to Dodge City yet.”

Dean settled back in his seat again and flipped his sunglasses back over his eyes. “Next time we stop for gas, we’re switching places,” he said in his “I’m older, therefore what I say goes” voice.

“Whatever,” Sam said. Dean had slept for an hour at most, but they still had three-quarters of a tank. Maybe he’d snooze for a little bit.

They’d driven through counties with names of Harvey and Reno, skirted the outer reaches of towns like South Hutchinson and Stafford. Dean preferred the state roads and US highways to the interstates; less traffic and easier for him to lord it over the road. But then, he belonged in towns like these, too, small and full of people who knew each other’s business. Sam—Sam preferred the interstates, getting places quickly. And he didn’t really think he belonged anywhere.

Anywhere other than the road. He hadn’t wanted to admit that for years, had run away to Stanford and insisted on stability, staying put in one place. But he realized that one place had looked like every other one place—the town might have a bigger or a smaller mall; Dillons grocery stores might give way to King Soopers or Albertsons the further west you went, but he could only really tell what part of the country he was in when he was on the road and saw hills give way to prairie give way to plains give way to mountains, when he felt the air cool or heat up, dry out or humidify.

“Would you freaking watch the road, Sam?” Dean said, slouched in the passenger seat with a hand shading his sunglass-covered eyes.

“Chill, Dean, I’ve been driving almost as long as you have,” Sam retorted. A semi was directly in front of them, creating its own wind current, and Sam hoped another passing lane was coming up soon. Or that the damned semi would just turn onto another highway.

“How much gas we got?”

“Enough,” Sam said long-sufferingly. It seemed like there were just enough towns along the road to fill up the gas-guzzler; but then, considering the age of the Impala and the road they were traveling, he supposed that made sense. Santa Fe Trail route, the little brown signs with the funky shield kept saying periodically, and he could see the railroad tracks winding along mostly parallel to the path they were following. It was a sunny day, no clouds above, and the horizon was far away.

Dean finally seemed to be sleeping again, and Sam could just make out the tall, clean white wind turbine blades turning regally in the distance behind them.

*

Dean was bitching about the smell now. “Cows,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “I fucking _hate_ cows.”

Just past Garden City, and Sam surveyed from the passenger seat the acres of penned-in cattle he could see standing and sitting around in the mud. He wondered if that was what the Union Stockyards had kinda looked like back in Chicago, a century or so ago. They’d spent a couple months one summer holed up in Galesburg, Illinois when they were still kids, and Sam had ended up spending a _lot_ of time reading stuff by and about Carl Sandburg. (He sometimes wondered why his dad and brother seemed so surprised he’d turned out smart—but spend that much time hanging around libraries and local historical societies growing up, and what else should they have expected?)

He thought about mentioning the Stockyards idea to Dean, getting his opinion, and then he thought about it again.

“Could be pigs,” he said laconically instead. “Hey, how much do chickens smell?”

“Bleh,” Dean replied expressively, and he looked out at the cows as well in distaste. “Fuckin’ cows,” he muttered.

*

Southwestern Colorado felt a lot more like the Southwest than the West, Sam had thought for a long time. All the Spanish Revival architecture, adobe and tiled roofs, even if the courthouses and other public buildings still tended to look pseudo-Greek or neo-Gothic, Victorian exuberance at its most elaborate. (Sam had taken an architectural history class a couple semesters ago; after traveling all over the damned country and watching these buildings slide by through a backseat window, it had been nice to put some social and historical context to everything he’d seen.)

They made it to Fowler as the light was beginning to fade, shadows growing longer and longer; and with the fading light the warmth from the sun also began to leach out. They parked at the first motel they found on the highway, squat, blue, and probably built not too many years before the Impala came off the assembly line. Dean headed for the lobby; Sam took a moment to get his feet back under him, swaying a little as he looked around what he could see of the town.

One of the things he definitely had _not_ missed about hunting with his brother and dad; long legs were not meant to be cooped up for that many hours at a time. Didn’t matter that he’d gotten out to stretch every time they stopped for gas, to get a drink or take a piss; after spending that long in a moving vehicle, Sam still felt like he was traveling that highway.

“You coming or what?” Dean called over his shoulder, pausing with his hand on the motel lobby door.

“Coming,” Sam said.

*

In the end, the chickens weren’t demonic. It took Sam and Dean three nights of hanging out at the Stockman Restaurant & Lounge across the highway from their motel to discover that a free range farmer had recently died, that his wife had been cheating on him with a couple other local guys, and that the two people attacked by the chickens had, in fact, been the farmer’s wife and one of her lovers. It seemed to take a while for the farmer’s spirit to work up control the chickens—the two previous attacks had been a week apart, and they were just coming to the end of another week.

On their third night in town, they dug up the farmer, salted and burned him, and then covered up their tracks as best they could.

“ _Chickens_ ,” Dean crowed in near-gleeful disbelief. “The dude was using _chickens_ to mess with his wife and her boyfriend. That’s just weirdly _awesome_.”

“Dude, _you’re_ weird,” Sam said, glancing askance at his older brother as they walked out of the cemetery and headed for the car.

“In _Fowler_!” Dean ignored him. “Fowler, Colorado! Shit like this doesn’t happen in real life!”

“Most people would not consider _anything_ that we do stuff that would happen in real life,” Sam retorted. “Would you shut up? We don’t want anybody to wake up and investigate, okay?”

Dean had drunk a lot of beer and whiskey chasers tonight, egging his new friends on to tell him more about the deceased chicken farmer. At least the Stockman didn’t have pool tables.

“The only people around here who might wake up are the dead,” Dean said with dignity, despite the fact that there was a row of squat ranch-style houses across the street, all of which thankfully remained dark. “And if they do, we know how to waste ‘em.”

“You are going to bed,” Sam said, pushing Dean into the passenger seat before swinging around to get into the driver’s seat of the Impala. “And _I_ am gonna drive first tomorrow morning.”

“No you’re not,” Dean said, pushing himself down more comfortably into the passenger seat. He sighed in contentment.

“Yes I am,” Sam said.

“Not.”

“Am.”

“Not.”

“Dude,” Sam said, “shut up.”

“Vengeful chicken farmer spirit,” Dean muttered, with a stupid little grin on his face. His head was leaning against the window. “Possesses chickens to make ‘em do his will.” He started giggling. “Whose _fowl_ idea was that?”

“Oh, Christ,” Sam groaned, “I hope you have a hangover the size of this state tomorrow morning.”

“Bitch,” Dean said as he stumbled out of the car and winded his way up to their motel room.

“Jerk,” Sam said, pushing him inside the room.

Dean fell asleep singing “This Land is Your Land.”

***

**Author's Note:**

>  _Disclaimer: I have only ever driven through Fowler, CO. Maybe one of these days I'll stop at the Stockman Restaurant & Lounge, but until then, this is all just my overactive imagination going for a spin._


End file.
